State of the Union Address

I thought that Bush did a great job with the State of the Union Address. It takes a lot of guts to talk about Social Security, it has been called the third rail of American politics.

The most brilliant moment of the evening was the spotlighting of the parents of the soldier killed in Iraq, who were fortuitously seated next to an Iraqi woman whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein's secret police.

Bush one-upped the Gipper on that one. Probably why blogger Diplomad said that "Ronald Reagan couldn't have done it any better." Taegan Goddard wrote, "President Bush took Ronald Reagan's 'heroes in the balcony' to a new level." OkieBoy says, "Dubya is about as good as it gets."

But Libertarian Girl wrote, "I started losing attention because I see right through that phony Oprah Winfrey stuff."

What Libertarian Girl forgets is that we live in a democracy, and people like Libertarian Girl, who are intelligent and logical about things, are in a minority at the voting booth. Bush has to sell his speech to the average American who is probably an Oprah Winfrey viewer.

Let's give Oprah Winfrey credit for being hugely successful doing her thing. I think her net worth is in the nine figures, making her an order of magnitude richer than yours truly.

I think that Bush has benefitted from attending Harvard Business School. He doesn't just think like a politician, he also thinks like a CEO. A CEO knows that the best products will fail in the marketplace if the marketing and sales aren't there. Most students of business are familiar with the story of Sony Betamax. Betamax was the technically superior product compared to VHS, but it failed on account of poor marketing.

Selling ideas is not entirely unlike selling VCRs. The scene with the parents of the soldier did a better job of selling Bush's foreign policy than any words he could have added to his speech.

Via Captain Ed, I learned from CNN that the post-speech poll had a very favorable reaction from the American public:

Overall, Bush got very positive or positive reactions to his speech from 86 percent of respondents, his best numbers since the State of the Union address he gave January 29, 2002 -- just four-and-a-half months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- when 94 percent of those polled gave him positive marks.

Comments

[David Foster]

Yeah, I was a bit surprised at LG's reaction to the meeting of the two women, which I thought was very moving. It's true their presence there was pre-planned....but so were the phrases in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This didn't make them any less emotionally valid.